Portable electronic devices such as smart phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and tablets have become popular and ubiquitous. More and more features have been added to these devices, and they are often equipped with powerful processors, significant memory, and open operating systems, which allows for many different applications to be added. Popular applications provide functions such as calling, emailing, texting, image acquisition, image display, music and video playback, location determination (e.g., GPS), and internet browsing functions, among others. Further, such devices often include various user input components for communicating instructions to control operation of the electronic device. For example, many mobile devices are equipped not only with various buttons and/or keypads, but also with touch detecting surfaces (such as touch screens or touch pads) by which a user, simply by touching a particular area of the mobile device and/or by moving a finger along the surface of the mobile device, is able to communicate instructions to control the electronic device.
Often mobile electronic devices (such as smart phones) have limited display screen and user interface surface area due to the desire to keep the device portable. Generally with such devices, only a single application can be viewed at one time. Further, switching between applications often requires closing or at least pausing a currently running application. Thus, it is desirable to provide an electronic device with features to address these concerns.